Fans of R.L Stine’s Fear Street series have a lot to get excited about, and that’s not even counting the upcoming Netflix adaptation of Prom Queen either. The Hollywood Reporter revealed that three more Fear Street films are in development, and will once again call Netflix home. The fourth film in the franchise is expected to hit sometime this year, and it will be followed by a new trilogy of films set in the mysterious and often deadly setting of Shadyside.
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When last asked about the future of Fear Street adaptations at the premiere of Goosebumps The Vanishing, Stine was pretty hopeful, telling THR “The writers are working,” Stine shared. “So I’ve got my fingers crossed.” Now we know they’ve been rather busy with the latest expansion of Stine’s franchise slate.
Fear Street is an original Young Adult series that aims for a slightly older style of horror than Stine’s other beloved series Goosebumps, and has sold over 80 million copies over the course of 51 books. The original trilogy of adaptations for Netflix was helmed by director Leigh Janiak, and one of the things she was most excited for was just how rich the possibilities were in this world of supernatural suspense.
“One of the exciting things about Fear Street is the fact that the universe is big and allows for a lot of space,” Janiak told IndieWire. “One of the things that I talked about before I was hired was that we have a potential here to create a horror Marvel [Cinematic Universe], where you can have slasher killers from lots of different eras. You have the canon of our main mythology that’s built around the fact that the devil lives in Shadyside, so there’s also room for everything else.”
[RELATED: Fear Street: Prom Queen: Netflix Shares Behind-the-Scenes Look at New Sequel]
“I think that my hope is that audiences like it enough that we can start building out [more], we can think about what another trilogy would be, what stand-alones would be, what TV would be,” Janiak said. “I don’t even think about it like TV or movies exactly anymore. That’s the great thing about Netflix and about what ‘Fear Street’ is, which is kind of a hybrid new thing. I’m excited about the possibility of what else can happen.” She added, “I really started getting excited about a ’50s slasher movie, which I haven’t really seen and what that means … It’s just cool to think about the different eras and what’s possible as a horror fan.”
Stine also highlighted one other major difference between Goosebumps and Fear Street, and that’s the rate of survival. “The thing about Goosebumps is that no one ever dies. That’s the difference between Goosebumps and Fear Street [where] we kill off teenagers, right and left. We kill them all. Everyone loves it when you kill teenagers,” Stine told THR. “There was a death in these first two episodes of the new [Goosebumps] season, but they have it happening 30 years ago. That’s a big difference. So it’s still Goosebumps. It’s just been elevated.” You can find the official description for The Prom Queen below.
“Welcome back to Shadyside. In this next installment of the blood-soaked Fear Street franchise, prom season at Shadyside High is underway and the school’s wolfpack of It Girls is busy with its usual sweet and vicious campaigns for the crown. But when a gutsy outsider is unexpectedly nominated to the court, and the other girls start mysteriously disappearing, the class of ’88 is suddenly in for one hell of a prom night.”
What do you want to see Stine take on next? You can talk all things film and TV with me on Bluesky @KnightofOA!